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VentureBeat is one of the many outlets featuring recently surfaced video of Steve Jobs doing an early demo of the Macintosh, 30 years ago. I remember first seeing one of these Macs in 1984 at a tiny computer store in bustling downtown Westminster, Maryland, and mostly hogging it while other customers (or, I should say, actual customers) tapped their feet impatiently.

Did you know that Goebel approached edison and attempted to sell him the patent for the lightbulb, but Edison refused, allowing Goebel to fall into destitution and die penniless. He then went to his destitute widow and offered her a fraction of the original asking price, effectively screwing Goebel's estate out of any royalties of the invention that Edison is most well known for? That's my whole issue here; people who steal other people's work, or who lie and cheat to get their hands on it. Edison was an asshole, if you don't believe me, just look at how he treated Goebel.

Too bad Goebel wasn't the patent holder. You're post show you lack any real knowledge of Gloebel (Göbel's ). I also find it hilarious that you blame Edision for Gloebel dying penniless. He didn't make any money form his actual patents either, is the also Edison's fault?

anyways:Heinrich Göbel, later Henry Goebel (April 20, 1818 – December 4, 1893), born in Springe, Germany, was a precision mechanic and inventor. He emigrated in 1848 to New York City and lived there until his death. In 1865

Did you know that Edison assigned many of his patents to his assistants?

Did you know that many of Edison's patents were actually developed by his assistants? It would have been inappropriate at best not to name them on the application, and probably illegal in at least some of the cases.

What pisses me off is that people are crazy Steve Jobs fanboys without realizing that he had little to no technical ability. He was a sales guy, and had an idea about how things should work and how they should look. That's it. He didn't build anything.

In other words, he understood human beings and had an idea of how human beings interact with technology. That alone made him a genius in an industry full of Asperger's sufferers who understand machines but not how people use them.

Look, man: no slashdotter worth his salt has any illusion that Steve Jobs was involved in technical design beyond a very abstract level.

But he's a disgusting human being for having clarity of vision and salesmanship? I'll grant that he seemed like a dick for other reasons, but that's another discussion.

I'm writing this from an Ubuntu box that I built myself, and I tend to be an OS pragmatist. I make my living as an engineer. I don't discount my own contribution in my work, but I dare say there is room for more Steve Jobs (Jobses?) in tech. Someone's got to identify opportunity, guide a bunch of engineers to a product, and then sell the fucking thing. If that someone is very highly effective, it's no small contribution and I submit that if one person deserves credit for Mac it's Jobs.

I truly don't get the level of vitriol for this guy... there are posts here that honestly read batshit, foaming at the mouth crazy to me.

Besides, have you seen what happens when engineers drive product design? There are situations where those products are appropriate but we're talking about mainstream PCs here. Sure, elements were ripped off from Xerox, sure you can probably dig up earlier, better technical implementations of most of this tech. The thing that matters, and the reason we're still talking about it, is that Apple brought it into your grandmother's living room.

You need both sorts of people. Geeks and engineers that can build cool stuff, solve hard problems, and guys like Steve Jobs to give it a structure, to motivate them and to get the damn thing shipped. Would there have been a Mac without Jobs? Maybe, but it would have never seen the light of day outside a R&D room. Would there have been a Mac without Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Steve Capps, et. al.? No of course not. It's not one-or-the-other, the Mac came into being because of all of th

Much of the internet is powered by real UNIX systems (BSD, you know, its where OSX took much of the core OS from). Learn some history, OSX was from NextStep. If not for that "reverse-merger" you would probably still be using a co-operative multitasking system (remember the good old days when a bad app crashed the entire system?)

Apple might be cheaper if they didnt insist on having ridiculous profit margins and an army of tools lined up to pay them. After all they source everything from China the same

I'm the GP, and I actually *like* OSX, but my reason is pretty simple; I hate dealing with desktop UNIX. Having to spend days to get 3d acceleration and the desktop configured "just so," only to have the next OS update torch all of my settings to a state where it may be impossible to recover... well... it's just not worth it to me. That's why I pay the apple tax; it's an exchange for not having to do all of that work, and it's worth it for me to never have to see glxgears ever again. I'm not a fanboy by any

I'm really nostalgic for the days when Silicon Valley was an innovative hotbed when some sharp brash kid could not only make it big, but provide a product that has some value.

Now, Silicon Valley is a bunch of whiny bitches who are trying to get ever cheaper labor for their social media/advertising app/user-data pimping service in order to market crap to a population in a downward spiral of their living standard.

Those were the kind of names we came to associate with very advanced technological achievement. They earned our respect with the tremendous advances they made.

But then something happened. Silicon Valley ceased to be about a productive, beneficial future. It became about a shitty, rotten future. It became about "social media". It became about advertising. It became about a disturbing level of data collection and mining.

The Silicon Valley of today is a mere shell of what it once was. Clad in fedora hats and rampant hipsterism, Silicon Valley of today is a sissified, degenerate place. Gone are the real scientists and engineers who advanced technology for all of mankind. Gone are their advances. Gone are the hope they brought.

I weep for Silicon Valley. It truly does make me quite distraught to think about what has happened to it. One of the greatest intellectual creations ever to existed has been crushed by men who wear tight jeans and glasses without lenses. It has been dragged through the mud by overweight, unshaven manchildren wearing stained shirts with shitty Japanese drawings on them. It has been shit upon repeatedly by self-styled "entrepreneurs" and "engineers" whose only talent is unjustifiable self promotion.

It is too late to save Silicon Valley. But other technologically-inclined regions should take note of what happened there. Keep away the hipsters. Keep away the bearded manchildren. Keep away the "entrepreneurs" and "engineers" who spew forth about Ruby on Rails. These people are an infection, and this infection will destroy even the most robust of technological and industrial communities. Do not let them ruin your community like they ruined Silicon Valley's.

The better video is one of Job's earlier talks on the founding of Apple [youtube.com]. Quite apart from the bespectacled, obviously geeky Jobs on display, a very striking aspect of the talk is Jobs' discussion of his visit to a local elementary school where he witnessed primary school students using computers. This event was one Jobs' continually referred back to later in his career, but this is probably first public discussion of the event which formed or else solidified his view that the PC industry could have/was havi

Or how about a video of the 1982 Comdex where supposedly VisiCorp showed off a development version of their brand new "GUI" environment Visi On? Doubt anyone recorded that, but it would be interesting to see.

And there is actually a video on Youtube of the fall 1983 Comdex with a demonstration of a brand new product in development from Microsoft called "Wiindows". Stole all the thunder from VisiCorp, but obviously didn't put a damper on Apple's Macint

What surprises me about all this coverage is that I don't remember the Mac being all that influential or popular at the time. I guess it was too expensive for the people around me. If you want to celebrate an Apple computer, celebrate the Apple II.

It was influential as it gave Jobs the excuse to stop developing the Apple II line and a money sink that almost sank Apple.The IIx could have come out years earlier and when it did come out as the GS it could have been less crippled. A souped up GS was everything the Mac wasn't, colour, fast, expandable, a large existing stock of software with a GUI that was a rewrite of the Mac GUI with many bug fixes.I can still hear Jobs saying users didn't need colour and a computer should be like a toaster, closed and

I keep pushing for legacy support of especially software but also hardware and formats and some people claim it doesn't matter. Well this is a beautiful example of why it does matter. Without legacy support we lose access to old data. Pretty soon we'll be repeating history on big things, not just some presentation.

I agree. There's a lot Apple themselves could be doing, by publishing private file formats that were used for early apps such as MacWrite, Claris Works and so on. A lot of people have unusable files in those formats, and many others. It's not really good enough to have to reverse-engineer them (as some are doing), but a published spec would at least make it possible to write converters.

This submission really isn't about the news article at all. It's about the most important Holy Day in the Religion of the Hipster. It's a celebration of His Graceful Holiness, Steve Jobs. It's a tribute to The Creation of The Master Of All Creation, the Macintosh. It is The Most Important of Days. Please show some respect.

Well, in 1984 indeed nobody had problems with Windows. Which may be because the first Windows version had not yet released yet. And the first memory extender hadn't yet been released either, therefore nobody had problems with those either.

It was the last door stop that I owed. C'mon guys, those old Macs couldn't even multitask. Think I'm lying. Open a session with a modem and then start any other application. The modem would close. Even Winders 3.0 could run a modem in the background.

You're right, but only up to a point. By '87 a system add-on called Multifinder ran multiple apps and that was integrated into the OS in system 7. This was co-operative multitasking for sure (same as Windows 3) but it was easy enough to make your app co-operate (actually harder to write it so that it didn't). You could also write system tasks that ran under the 680x0 interrupt if you needed something pre-emptive (though that was fraught with danger if you didn't know the system pretty intimately). I managed to do plenty of productive work on early Macs.

It's tough to describe how space-age that stuff was in the 1980s, where 4k and 8k home computers with 8 bit processors was the norm. The 32 bit Motorola 68000 series were used as workstation processors in Sun Microsystems' Sun 1 and Sun 2 workstations & servers, so it was quite surprising to see one in a personal computers.

Note also how Jobs hammers away at IBM, the evil empire who had held foul dominion over computing at that time for longer than MS has existed today. My, how times change.

In this video, when they show the Paint program, listen to the gasps of wondrous amazement when the "eraser" tool is demonstrated.

Which just shows how even back then Jobs was good at packing the audience with fans who would coo over anything and everything he did. That kind of thing had been demonstrated before, and was available to home users of 8 bit machines. Okay, this was better, but not amazing. It's the way Jobs presents it, not the actual demo.

"We think Unix is a pretty lousy operating system to put inside a workstation. It's old technology and it's really big and you need a Winchester so you can never make the workstations cheap..."
I'm glad that Jobs was open minded enough to recognize the value of Unix, and to eventually migrate MacOS to BSD Unix.
(I watched the video and typed this post from a laptop running Linux.)

He didn't so much change his mind as technology changed such that UNIX didn't seem so bloated relative to the new hardware and compared to alternatives with sufficient features for what the market expected.

I've heard Apple people describe this with the too-kind phrase "tradition of demonstrating a wolf in sheep's clothing." That is to say, the Mac he was demonstrating was different from the Mac Apple was selling: it had 512K of RAM. The only Mac available for purchase at launch had 128K and was not capable of running the MacInTalk speech synthesis software.

This was indeed a Steve Jobs tradition; I recall him demonstrating a NeXT in Boston--brilliant demo, brilliant showmanship--and the NeXT he was demonstrating had an internal hard drive, which delivered much better performance than the product available for sale which ran entirely off a read/write optical drive.

That is to say, the Mac he was demonstrating was different from the Mac Apple was selling: it had 512K of RAM. The only Mac available for purchase at launch had 128K and was not capable of running the MacInTalk speech synthesis software.

True, true. But the the 128K Mac was upgradable to 512K [everymac.com] (albeit by an authorized reseller, not by the end user), and Macs that already came with 512 KB of RAM [everymac.com] were introduced later that year.

I found it with google in literally under one minute. I can see why you're too cowardly to log in. People might know you're the village idiot. If they got to know you, they'd never read any of your comments.

But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just

I bought a "fat Mac" in 1985 (that was the 512K modelIt cost me 10,000 New Zealand dollars (about $4400US at the time)But an uncle had died, so I had the moneyIt was the worst decision I ever made(I had previously had an Apple ][+ which was why I gor the Mac)I should of bought Appleshares instead